Above the Clouds: Cory Richards on mountains, photography, and mental health
Cory Richards is one of the world’s elite mountain climbers and photographers, but underneath you’d find that he’s so much more than that. His convoluted and often difficult journey through life to get to where he is today is a story that I hope inspires empathy and understanding from all of us toward people struggling with mental health issues or addiction. And for those struggling with seemingly insurmountable problems in their lives, may his story shine a ray of hope.
When Richards was growing up in Salt Lake City, the outdoors roots were laid down early; he skied with his brother and discovered an early gift for climbing. Richards was as academically gifted as he was in athletics, starting high school at age 12. But this proved to be his downfall, for the older students at school lured him, a child who had already been diagnosed with ADHD and depression, into a world of drugs and chronic class-skipping and shaped him into a teenager who always told his parents “no”. Unsurprisingly, with his grades plunging into a bottomless pit, he dropped out of high school at age 14.
Eventually, his parents, frustrated and worried for their son’s future and at their wits’ end, put Richards in a juvenile psychiatric unit, where he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. But Richards ran away from the program three times, unable to put up with the constant messaging that there was something wrong with him that needed to be fixed. So his parents gave him an ultimatum---return to the program or move out of the family home. Richards chose the latter. He promptly became homeless for several years, couch-surfing and sleeping on park benches and even once staying with an LSD dealer.
Richards’ troubled mental health history continued to haunt him and he finally decided to return to the family home and to the psychiatric program. While his adolescent turbulence subsided somewhat, mental health issues continued to be in the background; he has taken antidepressant medication for most of his life, and both parents have family histories with depression and addiction.
His star rose in the elite climbing world, quickly catching the attention of more established climbers and allowing him to step into the field of professional climbing. The desire to climb new peaks eventually morphed into a desire to not only climb the peaks but also to tell the stories of the local places and people he met and visited along the way. With the help of a referral from an established climber, he became a photographer for National Geographic. He also successfully got corporate sponsors from brands like the North Face.
In the winter of 2011, Richards embarked on a fateful expedition to Pakistan’s Gasherbrum II to make the first winter ascent of one of the country’s 8,000 meter peaks with two other climbers. The team made history, overcoming extreme cold and the mood swings of high-altitude alpine weather. But they nearly didn’t make it down the mountain, for snow and ice from a neighboring peak became unstable and crashed onto the team, carrying them over a deep opening in the ice. Post-avalanche, Richards snapped an iconic, harrowing selfie showing him staring at the camera with ice all over his face that went on to be featured on a National Geographic cover and led to a documentary called “Cold” about their near-death experience that won the grand prize at the Banff Mountain Film Festival.
He became something of a hero in alpine circles and his budding career as a photographer took off after the avalanche; he started regularly shooting assignments for National Geographic which took him all over the world, from the Russian arctic regions to the Angolan highlands in Africa.
But surviving Gasherbrum II also gave him PTSD. Already vulnerable due to his history of mental health issues, Richards started retreating into the darkness of his own mind when he was home from assignments, and he suffered a panic attack during a 2012 trip to summit Mt Everest and was forced to abort the attempt.
Richards was inwardly disturbed by the yawning gulf that seemed to emerge between the climbing legend everyone else viewed him as and the floundering, unhonest person he thought he was. He had been cheating on his wife repeatedly, and he started turning to alcohol to numb the shame and mental hell engulfing his waking hours. Alcohol, of course, widened the gap even more between the man drunk in the hotel room in between National Geographic speeches and the star photographer and climber. When his mental health hit the canyon, he divorced his wife, gave up his share of the production company he started with his two best friends, and cut ties with North Face, at the time his primary sponsor. He even considered taking his own life; fortunately, he didn’t succeed.
He was able to get himself into therapy, become sober again, and make a comeback, summiting Mt. Everest twice in 2016 and 2017, endeavors that put him in the limelight of the mainstream media. His most recent story in National Geographic was shot in the high elevations of the Karakoram range, reporting on the world’s highest battlefield where India and Pakistan face off over contested territory near a desolate glacier surrounded by unnamed, majestic peaks. Mountains and the extreme high-altitude reaches of the planet get both a reputation for being dramatically alluring and for being dangerous among the general public, a view that is not undeserved.
But Richards, having spent so much time in mountains most of us can only dream of going to, would like to add nuance to this view. For him, if approached correctly, mountains are more like an introspective school: a place to learn deeper truths about oneself and about the interconnectedness of nature.
“It’s also a beautiful place to learn about human potential and capacity. . .those truths are illuminated when we extract ourselves from the noise of the world around us right now,” Richards said in an interview with me. “The mountains are an environment or arena that our planet relies on, and as we change the planet through our actions, the mountains themselves change and they have downstream effects.”
He also cautions people not to over-ascribe anthropomorphic characteristics to an inanimate environment; the mountains are simply a lens through which these truths can emerge, but the “lens” itself is indifferent to the wellbeing of the person, just as a real lens is indifferent to the image a photographer is trying to capture. He sees the human tendency to only see the dramatic as an impediment to celebrating the overall tranquility of the mountain environment.
In addition, the moment of summiting tends to be romanticized in non-mountaineering circles as a moment when philosophical truths about the world suddenly make sense or at least a moment of pure celebration, but Richards tells us that’s an illusion created in hindsight, at least for him.
“The epiphany is ‘oh shit, I’m actually at greatest risk. . .because I’m exhausted, I’m really high, I’m depleted, I’m tired, and I’m now as far away from safety as I’m going to get,’” he said with a note of humor. “I try to be mindful of hindsight and not to let a romantic vision of what took place to overtake what actually took place.”
In between climbs, he spends many of his days doing intense physical training in preparation for upcoming expeditions; another summit attempt on Mt. Everest is due to take place this year. The workouts generally consist of a mix of steady-state training---aiming to keep the heart rate low for an extended period of time during the workout---and intensity training that aims to build up and maintain physical strength. He’d wake up at dawn and ride his bike for forty or more miles in the morning, before he has had any breakfast, reserve the middle eight hours of the day for more sedentary work, and do an intensity workout in the gym in the evening based on a Crossfit regimen. Of course, with such high-intensity activity, Richards has to make sure he is properly nourished and rested.
“The truth is you don’t get your gains during the workouts; you get them when you rest and recover,” he insisted.
Along his travels, he occasionally stops to make portraits of the eclectic locals and multifaceted cultures that enrich his journeys and make them possible---whether it is a line of monks with alms bowls in hand to receive offerings from the public, or an elderly man with prayer beads in his hand in Nepal, or the soulful eyes of an older sherpa who has seen much in his career staring gently into the camera. Although he has made climbing and mountain photography into a hugely successful career, the portraiture genre is one of his true loves in photography.
“Portraiture to me is. . .one of the most beautiful expressions of art or photography because it is dependent on the exchange between the person being photographed and the photographer,” he reflected. “There has to be an emotional dialogue that takes place,” even though it may not be a deep or truly emotional connection, he said.
He observed that critics may find his portraits soulful or raw because he looks for the frames that show an unguarded moment, a moment when they’re simply being themselves and are not trying to push their story or message out into the world.
“The frames that I tend towards are the moments when those stories seem to disappear and they are simply existing,” he explained.
As he rebooted his career after that low point when he detonated his career and marriage all in one month, Richards started opening up to the public about his mental health struggles. He hopes to, as he put it, become “a voice that normalizes the conversation around mental health” and to break down the stigma and social barriers that tend to keep the conversation around the issue shrouded in the shadows and keep survivors invisible. He is grateful that, as he publicized his journey with mental health and the inevitable ups and downs of recovery, he has not felt misunderstood; rather, he has come to believe that honesty about such a difficult topic generates a deeper, more nuanced and more complete understanding of it. And that’s a source of hope.
“I’m not a victim,” Richards states emphatically. “I hope that my platform would be a consistent source of encouragement around individual journeys with mental health and that in spite of the struggles that people might be facing or are facing, they can. . .live very deep, meaningful lives, enriched by their journey with mental health [rather than be] chained by it.”
To see more work from Richards, follow him on Instagram @coryrichards
